Developing Mobile Web Applications: When, Why, and How

Our planet is the home of 7.9 billion people, according to the Live World Population Clock in worldometers.info. Over half of these people have access to smartphones. Studies show that every day more people are joining the Internet via their smartphones. That means every second, more and more apps are getting downloaded on these devices.

As mobile computing has become ubiquitous, companies are investing in hybrid app development all over the world. But it can get really frustrating and also difficult to navigate when a mobile app has poor design or else has a native app.

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A few of the things become intensely irritating when a mobile app developer has to support a wider range of mobile clients. Each of these has something frustrating to deal with. You may want to develop a mobile-native, native, or hybrid app for multiple mobile platforms, sophisticated devices, and browsers. It can be quite a hassle.

Mobile Web App vs. Hybrid App vs. Native App

When it comes to technology selections, different sizes fit different answers. The same follows when it’s about mobile app development. The industry has many web app best practices, some of which are also not technical.

First, developers must know the target audience of the app. Will this audience prefer a native app or mobile app? They may want a hybrid app. In such a situation, hybrid app development India can come forward with their expertise. What’s the difference between a hybrid app and a native app?

In comparison to the native mobile app route, the web app route is cheaper yet faster, even when it supports a wide range of devices. Also, some capabilities are native to the mobile device, which is essential to the app. These capabilities are mostly accessible through a native app.

In such times, the hybrid mobile app is the perfect answer for you. It depends upon your resource constraints and requirements. Both native apps, and hybrid apps run on the device instead of running inside a browser. However, these apps are written using web technologies, hence being underpinned by the hybrid app framework.

Hybrid apps leverage a device’s browser engine for rendering HTML and local JavaScript processing but run inside the native containers. It accesses device capabilities that are far from accessible in mobile web applications like camera, accelerometer, and local storage.

Detailed Planning Requires For Mobile Web App Development

The web development process can’t start without detailed planning. It means that first, you have to identify the requirements that are essential for app development. Then it is time to run research work on targeted capabilities and determine their achievability in the mobile web app.

Things can get extremely frustrating when he/she realizes that your client supports one or more key functions you have created. After all, the mobile web developer has invested his/her time and resources in designing the web-based interface and support infrastructure. So, before starting the development process, the developer and client should come to an agreement after detailed planning.

Optimize Mobile Web Application For Better Performance

A mobile web app developer would never want to hear from the users that an app is running slow. Therefore, one has to think of ways to reduce and optimize each byte and server transfer to reduce user wait time. After all, users won’t have access to WiFi all the time.

People expect that a site or an app gets loaded within 3 seconds or less. Google has found out that each five-second delay in loading drops the traffic to 20%. Here are few tips that a mobile app developer can integrate while optimizing the performance of the web applications, minimizing latency:

• Image Optimization

Image loading time is the biggest performance issue on mobile devices. Using online image optimizers can address the issue for you to take the necessary steps.

• Code Compression

Based upon the code amount, you would need to compress the CSS and JavaScript files. It can make a huge impact on the performance.

• Database Queries

Some browsers of mobile devices don’t accept too many cookies, unlike desktop browsers. It helps in executing more queries. So, the server-side cache becomes crucial for supporting mobile web apps.

• Content Delivery Networks

When you are providing lots of images, videos, audio files, or different types of media, using CDN is a must. CDN improves downloading performance, allows more concurrent downloads, and enhances analytics.

Mobile Web App Development Tools

Like in any domain, software development also requires the right tools to provide better solutions. And there are many tools that can be right for your mobile web application development. In case you are planning hybrid app development in India for your business, you can contact a reputed company.

Right JavaScript Mobile Web App Framework

Mobile web app development can create almost the same challenges like inconsistent HTML and CSS and cross-browser compatibility in different mobile browsers. Some frameworks are specifically designed to address these issues and make the apps work flawlessly on a wide array of tablets and smartphones. Most of the frameworks of the mobile web app are lightweight that facilitates fast mobile web browsing. It doesn’t compromise the look and feel of any website.

JQuery is the single most JavaScript framework that has a broad spectrum beyond the mobile landscape. You can try JQuery Mobile in your mobile web app if you are familiar with the desktop version.

Sencha Touch is another one that has gained market share just like JQuery. It offers excellent overall performance and helps in procuring a mobile web user interface. Based on Sencha’s ExtJS JavaScript library, Sencha Touch’s widget library is full-featured.

Responsive Frameworks

In recent years, many responsive frameworks have come into existent. Among them, Foundation and Bootstrap are extremely popular. Responsive frameworks streamline and simplify the web-based responsive UI design, encapsulating the most common layouts and UI paradigms into the performance-optimized, reusable framework.

These responsive frameworks are based on JavaScript and CSS. Also, most of them are open source. That means they are free to download and can be customized. If you have a particular set of requirements, using one of these frameworks can reduce the designing effort and implement-effort of the mobile web application.

Debug And Testing Mobile Web Apps

Debugging mobile web apps can be extremely tricky and sometimes become frustrating. In case you are scrounging around for various devices for testing, it gets even more troublesome. Sometimes, you may have to install SDKs for emulating the targeted client platforms.

However, there’s an advantage of mobile web development in comparison to native app development. You have standard browser-based developer tools for debugging your application. Here are a few debugging and testing web apps:

Interactive Editor: It offers the ability to edit CSS or JavaScript on the fly.

Mobile Emulator of Chrome’s DevTools: Selecting Chrome for debugging mobile web apps becomes easier with the mobile emulator. It offers touch events emulation, network bandwidth throttling, user agent spoofing, device orientation overrides, etc.

Superior JavaScript Debugger: It allows for DOM breakpoints and provides the ability to profile the JavaScript code execution time.

Support For Android Debug Bridge Protocol: It facilitates the easy representation of remote debugging sessions.

Built-in JSON and XML viewers: It avoids the need for any plugins for inspecting server responses.

About The Author :-

Hermit Chawla is MD at AIS Technolabs, a Web/App design and Development Company, helping global businesses to grow. He spends his time writing extensively on Web & App Development, Clone App Development and Game Development. You can reach out to him on his Linkedin profile here.

Source: https://blog.ionixxtech.com/developing-mobile-web-applications-when-why-and-how/